Integrating Teaching and Learning (eBook)

Series Introduction

Welcome to Integrating Teaching and Learning: “Timeless Essentials” for Creating Integrated Units of Study! The “timeless essentials” you will read about in this series are indispensable elements that educators are successfully using to create quality units of study or to enhance their existing program units. In essence, these elements have proven themselves over time to represent the fundamentals of “good teaching.”

Throughout this series, you will see four adjectives describing the elements necessary for creating quality units of study: timeless, essential, aligned, and integrated.

Timeless

From my 25 years of experience in sharing these time-tested elements with educators, both through in-person and virtual professional learning workshops, and through my published and republished books, I have come to the realization that these elements are indeed “timeless”, meaning they are just as relevant and necessary for the development of quality units of study today as they were years ago, and will likely continue to be so in the future.

Essential

Collectively, these elements provide the foundation—the core—of continuing best practices in education: effective use of standards, learning targets, and success criteria that are clear to teachers and students; established assessment elements in multiple formats; instructional planning based on the progression of learning; frequent use of student feedback from formative assessments to inform and adjust educators’ instruction and students’ learning strategies; and interactive student learning tasks directly aligned to the standards. Individually and collectively, these elements are both timeless and essential.

Aligned

Alignment means the layout or proper arrangement of things in relationship to one other. An aligned system in education refers to a system where all the essential elements are closely coupled to work together to achieve a specific goal in a unit of study.

For example, when teachers identify Essential Standards and align them across the grades, or develop Student Learning Targets and Success Criteria, any of these key practices, used independently, will positively improve instruction and student learning. Yet how much more of a positive impact on student learning these practices can have when they are intentionally aligned with other equally effective practices to work interdependently!

Integrated

Integrated in the education context is typically synonymous with interdisciplinary, the blending of multiple content areas or disciplines to help students understand how different subjects interrelate. In the context of this book series, however, I am using the term integrated to represent the merging of educator instruction and student learning.

Working in sync with one another, these timeless, essential, aligned, and integrated elements have the power to transform how educators can successfully teach and reach every student in their professional care and how students can be active participants in the teaching-learning partnership.

Looking Through the “Lens” of the Educator

I am, first and foremost, a teacher and practitioner. For 24 years, I taught well over 1000 students at both the elementary and secondary levels in diverse geographic and socioeconomic settings in Illinois, Arizona, and California. In 1999, I made a major career change that completely altered and enlarged my classroom, exchanging children and teens as my students for adult educators and leaders in school systems all over North America and beyond.

Coming from my 49 years of combined teaching and consulting experience, I continue to look at everything having to do with improving teaching and student learning through the “lens” of the busy classroom educator. My direct experience of sharing this process with educators, seeing them thoughtfully engage in the application of the unit-design steps, and receiving their positive feedback at the conclusion of workshop sessions, has confirmed that these elements are the critical fundamentals for educators to learn and put into sustained practice so they can improve academic competency and personal success for all their students.

This certainly does not limit the audience of this book series to educators only. In my many years of sharing these “timeless essential” elements with school and district leaders, they too have seen the practical and relevant nature and value of this integrated process. For this process to ultimately “take root” in a school system depends on two vital factors: (1) the DIT (do-it-together) involvement of participating educators to create and integrate these essential elements in their own units of study and (2) the organization and direction of efforts by school and/or district leaders to implement the system effectively over time.

Seeing the Big Picture First

When attending professional learning workshops or reading how-to education books, busy educators and leaders rightly want to know upfront, “What is this about? Why is it important for me to consider using these ideas? Does this really work?” Everyone must be able to make their own relevant connections first, by seeing how all the related parts fit together to form one meaningful whole, before being motivated and willing to invest valuable time, thought, and energy into learning and adding anything else to what they are already doing.

That’s why it is so important for everyone involved to first see and understand the big picture of what the finished system looks like. This will greatly help, inspire, and sustain everyone’s purposeful efforts when educators are engaged in creating their own quality units of study or enhancing program units they are already using.

The good news is that they don’t have to wait to reap the rewards of their efforts until the entire big picture is finished. They will be able to start using each part of the system in their own classrooms or other instructional spaces even while proceeding through the process, because each individual element can also stand alone on its own merit.

It may not be necessary for educators to create each element in this design sequence, from start to finish. Several of these elements may already be included in their units of study. Educators can simply focus on adding to their existing units those elements they now see as also being necessary to include.

And herein lies an important point: these elements are not necessarily new for educators. These practices are long-established ones already in use in classrooms across the country and the world. The purpose of this series is not about adding more to what educators are already doing. It’s about making sure they (1) include all the essential teaching and learning elements in their units of study, and that they (2) intentionally align and integrate all these elements to create a cohesive whole.

The ITLS Big Picture

The easiest way to organize these timeless essentials is to present them in a sequential design sequence, with each element building upon the ones that came before it. This design sequence can then serve as a “blueprint” for those school-based unit “designers” who desire or need to “build or remodel” their own units of study.

Here is the big picture graphic of all the elements that together make up the Integrated Teaching and Learning System©.

The foundation of the entire system begins with a sharp focus on the prioritization of Essential Standards. Then, following in a clockwise progression from the top of the design, it ends with the design of Standards-Aligned Learning Tasks.

A Multiple Volume Series Versus a One-Volume “Tome”

Rather than publishing a stand-alone, one-volume lengthy tome, I decided to create instead a more reader-friendly three-volume series that encompasses the entire ITLS process. Readers thus have the option of going through the series in its entirety, or selecting individual volumes that are of immediate relevancy and interest. An introduction at the beginning of each volume, along with a short conclusion at the end, clarifies how the three volumes work together.

Each chapter of the Integrated Teaching and Learning System© begins with the “what” and “why” of the individual element in focus, illustrated with content-specific, grade-level and/or course-level examples. Relevant research, cited by prominent educational thought leaders, adds support to the practical value of these elements. Educators can experience the step-by-step ITLS design process firsthand by applying it to a unit of choice, on their own or collaboratively with colleagues. Through this direct engagement, they can determine...